In 1926, Lee DeForest, inventor of the vacuum tube, said, "While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility."

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible," said Lord Kelvin, president of the British Royal Society and one of the nineteenth century’s greatest experts on thermodynamics.

"A rocket will never be able to leave the earth’s atmosphere," stated the New York Times in 1936.

"Space travel is utter bilge," said a British astronomer in 1956.

"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom," said Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Milliken in 1923.

"Taking the best left-handed pitcher in baseball and converting him into a right fielder is one of the dumbest things I ever heard," said Tris Speaker in 1919. He was talking about Babe Ruth.

In 1929, Yale economist Irving Fisher said, "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." Two weeks later, the stock market crashed.

MGM executive Irving Thalberg had this for Louis B. Mayer regarding Gone With the Wind: "Forget it, Louie, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel."

The director of Blue Book Modeling Agency advised Marilyn Monroe in 1944, "You better learn secretarial work or else get married."

"You ain’t going nowhere, son. You ought to go back to driving a truck," said Jim Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, in firing Elvis Presley after a performance in 1954.

"We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out anyway," said the president of Decca Records, rejecting the Beatles in 1962.

Darryl Zanuck observed, in 1946, "Television won’t last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."

The chairman of IBM said, "I think there is a world market for about five computers," in 1943.

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home," said the president of Digital Electronic Corporation in 1977.

"We will bury you," predicted Nikita Kruschev in 1958.

Visionary designer Buckminster Fuller said, in 1966, "By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties."

Social scientist David Riesman declared, in 1967, "If anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women."

And here’s one for those who worry that the world will end in the year 2000: Henry Adams said, in 1903, "My fingers coincide in fixing 1950 as the year when the world must go smash. The world is coming to an end in 1950."

As Fats Waller, one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, observed, "One never knows, do one?" That is an excellent adage for futurists.